My good old paternal parent made me work many hours each night, and
though he knew nothing of the subjects he could read English and would
hear all my lessons and other brothers', and we had to say Skagger Rack,
Cattegat, Scaw Fell and Helvellyn, and such things to him, and he would
abuse us if we mis-arranged the figures and letters in CaH2O2 and
H2SO4 and all those things in bottles. Before the Matriculation
Examination he made a Graduate, whom he had got under his thumb-nail,
teach us all the answers to all the back questions in all subjects till
we knew them all by heart, and also made us learn ten long essays by
heart so as to make up the required essay out of parts of them. He
nearly killed my brother by starvation (saving food as well as punishing
miscreant) for failing--the only one of us who ever failed in any
examination--which he did by writing out all first chapter of Washington
Irving for essay, when the subject was 'Describe a sunrise in the
Australian back-blocks'. As parent said, he could have used 'A moonlight
stroll by the sea-shore' and change the colour from silver to golden.
But the fool was ill--so ill that he tried to kill himself and had not
the strength. He said he would rather go to the missionaries' hell, full
of Englishes, than go on learning _Egbert, Ethelbald, Ethelbert,
Ethelwulf, Ethelred, Alfred, Edward the Elder, Edred, Edwy, Edgar,
Ethelred the Unready_, and _If two triangles have two sides of the one
equal to two angles of the other each to each and the sides so subtended
equal then shall the bases or fourth sides be equal each to each or be
isosceles_.

"Well, the progenitor kept our noses in the pie night and day and we all
hated the old papa piously and wished he and we and all teachers and
text-books were burned alive.

"But we were very much loved by everybody as we were so learned and
clever, and whenever the Collector or anybody came to School, the Head
Master used to put one of us in each room and call on us to answer
questions and recite and say capes and bays without the map, and other
clever things; and when my eldest brother left I had to change coat with
another boy and do it twice sometimes, in different rooms.

"Sometimes the Educational Inspector himself would come, but then
nothing could be done, for he would not ask questions that were always
asked and were in the book, like the teachers and Deputy Inspectors did,
but questions that no one knew and had to be though